The Disney-ABC owned company parted ways with Hank Williams, Jr., the performer and writer of the song, for expressing his political opinions about Barack Obama and the Republican leaders who refuse to recognize him as their political enemy during an appearance on Fox & Friends. In the interview, Williams likened the June golf summit with Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Boehner, and John Kasich to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu playing golf with Adolf Hitler.

Williams’ remarks have generated controversy because they have been widely misreported. Contrary to reports, Williams didn’t call Obama Hitler, and he didn’t say that Obama is like Hitler. What Williams did was use a golf game to make his point that people who are political enemies and at odds with one another shouldn’t be part of a four-some in the same golf game. Admittedly he referred to Obama as the enemy, but he was just following Obama’s example by using the same word Obama had used to describe Republicans last October.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time that ESPN has reacted to political viewpoints critical of Obama. In August ESPN brass reprimanded golf analyst Paul Azinger for mocking Obama on Twitter: “Potus has played more golf this month than I have: I have created more jobs this month than he has.” Yet, when sports anchor Kenny Mayne and football analyst Adam Shefter had expressed their political views on Twitter months earlier, ESPN did not reprimand them.

In May Shefter tweeted, “On 60 minutes, President Obama never was more impressive.” In commenting on why Obama refused to release the photos of the body of bin Laden to the media, Shefter wrote, “We don’t spike the football.” Then the following month Mayne tweeted, “almost rammed car with palin [sic] bumper sticker, with intent.. held up..coulda been kids in car.”

But ESPN’s political bias was clearly exposed last month by its Las Vegas, Nevada, affiliate. During KWWN‘s sports talk show “Gridlock,” hosts Mitch Moss, Pauly Howard, and Seat Williams interviewed Mike Tyson and asked for his take on Sarah Palin’s alleged one-night-stand with former NBA star Glen Rice that happened when Rice was a college basketball player and Alaska’s former governor was an Anchorage sports reporter.

“Glen Rice is a wonderful man. He’s a wonderful guy. You want her to be with somebody like [Dennis] Rodman … ya git up in there … pushing her guts up in the back of her head, right? [Gridlock hosts laughing hysterically]

Throughout the program the Gridlock “hosts cackled and guffawed in harmony at Tyson’s every deplorable comment.” In fact, Moss tweeted that his head hurt from laughing so hard at Tyson’s “Sarah Palin … she met the ‘wombshifter'” comment.

“WOW! @miketyson just made his most epic appearance ever with Gridlock! #wombshifter??! Are you serious?! My head hurts from laughing.”—Mitch Moss

When asked if the Palin allegation would garner black votes, Tyson replied, “She could always get boned out by a black person, a vote to bang her.” Tyson’s crassness and outrageous depictions of violent interracial sex are to be expected from the man whose history is replete with violence, wife abuse, and madness. But what was unexpected was the appallingly approving laughter contributed by KWWN’s on-air talent.

The Gridlock hosts found the misogynistic fantasies of the convicted rapist absolutely hilarious, and they also found his racist notion that all white women want to have sex with black men as part of their “ritualistic rite of passage into womanhood” seriously comical. But several bloggers reporting on the story having heard the audio clip of the program were not amused.

To date, ESPN has not dismissed or reprimanded the Gridlock hosts for their sophomoric antics and loathsome behavior, and Tyson’s name has not been stricken from the guest list. One consolation is that ESPN’s true colors have been displayed for all sports fans to see. They now know that the sports network is run by progressives who support Obama and censor political speech that contradicts his leftist agenda.

People who write or phone ESPN to express their outrage are wasting their time. The network is a profit-making enterprise; drops in profit margins attract attention, not complaints.

The true test is whether or not Republican lawmakers, radio talk show hosts, and media conservatives will put principle ahead of pleasure and urge their constituents, readers, and listeners to tune out Monday Night Football until ESPN bans future Tyson interviews, issues mea culpas to Sarah Palin and all conservative women, and fires the Gridlock hosts for creating the impression that violence against conservative women is acceptable in society.

People are known more for what they do than what they say, i.e., “by their fruits ye shall know them.” Get this story in the hands of Republican lawmakers, radio talk show hosts, and media conservatives; then determine if there’s a difference between what they do and what they say.

Although Moss’ tweet’s been scrubbed from his Twitter feed, the captured snapshot appears below:

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3 Responses

Let’s say the rumors are true. So what? It was 1987, 24 years ago. I don’t know if she was even married then.

Hank Williams must go but these creeps go on with their careers without any comment? They deliberately asked MIKE TYSON what he thought about a sexual rumor, “speaking of cocaine”. That alone is lighting a stinkbomb fuse and denying responsiblity when it goes off. “Uppity” rich white women want and need to be sexually injured by a black man as a rite of passage. No stereotyping there. A convicted sex criminal’s opinion is always appropriate when the subject is a successful woman, especially a conservative. This is a sports program, not a late-night lampoon. Disney and ABC should be very proud.

Where the National Organization for Women now? Hear the crickets? That’s because it’s only the National Organization for Abortion Any Time, Every Time. Palin threatens the sacrament of modern feminism–abortion through 9 months, period. She had the effrontery to give birth to a “flawed” baby rather than kill him, and then use him as a “prop”. Pretty effective “prop” for showing her choosing life and not being coerced into “terminating a flaw”. I’d take her “prop” over a mangled mass of aborted fetus any day. Their “prop” is forever lying about and trying to hide from young women what fetuses actually look like from two months onward, so the young women can in turn lie to themselves about what they are really doing. Because abortion is all that matters to NOW, not Muslims stoning women to death, not clitoridectomies, not subjugation of women under Sharia, not the half of the aborted babies that are female. Their favorite President voted to treat a survivor of a late abortion literally as if it were already dead tissue, when he was in the Illinois Senate. He claimed that to treat a suvivor of an abortion as a human being was aganst the spirit of Roe v. Wade. He was alone in this ghoulish interpretation. Yet, by hiding this from the average voter, the media protected and got him elected. It is pathetic that I know that Court in Roe v. Wade ruled that the age of viability was the dividing line, not 9 months gestation, but that the brilliant “Constitutional attorney and professor” did not.

A court just recently struck down a law requiring doctors offices to show what fetuses actually look like at the stage of the prospective abortion patient’s gestation. It was ruled to be against the doctor’s free speech rights. He has a right to “free non-speech” apparently, to keep the patient ignorant so that more abortions will occur. In a recent article in which a lower crime rate was attributed to Obama’s election without any evidence except co-incidence, they also opined that the millions of abortions may have lowered crime by having fewer unwanted childred raised by resentful parents. Again, this is unprovable and therefore unimpeachable in the modern way of “thinking”.

Kenny Mayne jokes about vehicular mayhem to get at a Palin bumper sticker. Where’s the outrage?

I don’t expect ESPN to act like conservatives might act, but I do expect people like Hank to understand that there are consequences to their actions. Watching that video of the interview more than a few times, I don’t think much of Hank Williams Jr. He’s not very smart. This is not a hill worth fighting for.

As evidence by the title of my commentary “Hold ESPN Accountable for Its Abominable Treatment of Sarah Palin,” I’m not arguing for ESPN to reinstate Hank Williams, Jr. I used the Williams incident as an example to contrast it with the Mike Tyson interview involving the three hosts who work for the Las Vegas ESPN affiliate. My beef with ESPN is the double standard and the abominable treatment of Palin and conservative women.

Instead of watching the Williams video, you should have listened to the audio clip (both a partial clip and the full interview are linked in the commentary) of the Tyson interview and the hosts laughing hysterically at his vile remarks.

Imagine the outcry if the hosts worked for a Fox Sports affiliate and Tyson’s comments were made in reference to an alleged tryst of Geraldine Ferraro’s.

I’ve credited you for being smarter than most of the talk show hosts out there; don’t make me walk it back.